Odysseus the Player

My new job entertains me in a thousand ways.  Though all day I've dreaded grading this small stack of Odyssey essays, I starting laughing almost immediately: the title of the first one I read was Gods Are Better Than Humans.  Another essay argues that the men in The Odyssey are "players," while the women are expected to be chaste and loyal.  I love it when 14-year-old girls write papers with feminist themes.  And use the word "player."

There was a puppet show about Scylla and Charybdis, and a song about Odysseus and the cyclops. At the end of one hour spent in the computer lab, one of my favorite students ran up to me and said this about her Jane Eyre paper:  "Ms. Shrew, I think I'm finished!  And I kept in the stuff about Mr. Rochester's blindness!"  She looked so happy--I remember being that happy when I finished my Scarlet Letter paper when I was her age.  My thesis was about the symbol of light...I don't remember anything else about it really, except sitting at my desk scanning the novel for perfect quotes and circling them in an obsessive way.  

I just wrote a quiz about pronouns.  This is what I do for a living now.  I had no idea how much I would love it or how exhausted it would make me.  I can see myself doing this for a long time, though this job is going to end in a month.  So many things are going to change in a month--I'm going to become an aunt, I'm going to be unemployed again, my dude is actually going to live in my country. 

 Today I told my mom that my boyfriend is getting a vasectomy.  I'm not really sure how or why that came out.  Sometimes I get weirdly confessional with my mom.  The thing I felt weirdest about is not that it's now out in the open that we won't ever have kids together, or that I'm not very interested in having babies, but that now she must know that we're having sex.  Or that we will being doing it in an unmarried way in the future.  I still feel like I'm fourteen when it comes to crap like this--even though I've been married and have lived with people, I still assume that my parents think I'm a virgin.  Oh well.  Mom's response was her sort of fake nothing-you-say-can-surprise-me laugh, the one she reserves for every statement I make on the subject of marriage, childbirth, and all of the other practices from which I seem to be sliding further and further away.  I usually don't talk to her about these things.  It did seem like a nice balancing comment for our discussion of my sister's baby shower.

This is all of the time I've alloted to myself for non-grading.